Four monks
took a vow of silence. When night came, one of them said, “Fix the lamps.” The
second replied, “We are not supposed to speak.” The third said, “Stupid fools!
Why did you talk?” The fourth said to himself in silence, “I am now the only
one who has not spoken.”

At each level of escalation, there
is a greater break with the spirit of the vow; the fourth monk, who alone keeps
the outward appearance of silence, is actually the worst offender because he
breaks his silence in the interior recesses of himself — and breaks it in order
to entertain self-congratulating pride.

Therein lies the danger of legalism.
There is a tendency to think that, because we keep the commandments and obey
the laws of the Church, we are superior somehow to all of those sinners out
there. We stand and look at the outwardly visible sins of others in the smug
conviction that we are the good, the righteous, the upright. Of course, the
very moment that we think this we fall into the worst of sins: spiritual pride.

People tend to think about this
matter backwards; the more obvious, socially unacceptable and clearly odious a
sin is, the more grave it must be. The prostitutes and the tax collectors (or
the smut peddlers and Wall Street bankers) are the “real” sinners. We are the
good. We are God’s chosen ones.

Yet Christ says exactly the
opposite. It is not the righteous Pharisee but the humble tax collector who
goes home justified before God. The greatest sins are not those that look the
worst on the outside, but those that rot the soul from within: the sins of
pride, and especially of spiritual pride.

Spiritual pride is difficult to
guard against. It is hard to really look at oneself and believe, rather than
just pretend to believe, that one’s own sins are of the highest order. It is
pleasant to imagine that the sins we never commit, and especially the ones we
are never even tempted to commit, are the worst. Spiritual pride offers us comfort,
self-esteem, the warm glow of self-congratulation and the pleasant conviction
that all of heaven is arrayed like a bride trembling in anticipation at the
thought of our arrival.

It is a pleasure to arrive before
the confessional and assure ourselves, “Thank God I only have small sins to
confess.” We read Scripture as a checklist of sins that we don’t commit. We
hear a sermon about the evils of contraception and divorce and think, “Way to
go, Father. Finally someone is telling those people what they need to hear.”

Legalistic faith always leads,
sooner or later, to spiritual pride — and the greater the preponderance of
rules, the greater the temptation. This is not to say that rules ought to be
done away with altogether; on the contrary, they are absolutely necessary,
particularly in the early years when the conscience is being formed. But when
adherence to the law becomes the whole of the religious life, the interior
dies.

An
analogy can be drawn to the art of writing. The children who win spelling bees
rarely go on to write great literature. You can have perfect adherence to the
laws of grammar, style and spelling and still produce a document that no one
wants to read. The rules are there for a purpose. They are necessary guidelines
that make communication possible. But they are only useful when put in the
service of genuine content and inspiration.

The spiritual life, like a work of
art, is always an imperfect work in progress. The legalist wants a sort of
paint-by-numbers spirituality, a mass-produced sanctity that he can be sure of
getting right. He does not want to “work out [his] salvation in fear and
trembling” (Philippians 2:12). And, when he does fear, he manifests
superstitious scrupulosity — not the fear of the Prodigal Son on the road to
his father’s house, but the fear of an obsequious slave who has accidentally
committed some petty infraction of the master’s rules.

The irony is: Most legalists keep a
couple of cherished loopholes to wriggle through. Priests who deviate slightly
from the liturgical rubrics laid out by Rome are leading their flocks down the
wide road to damnation, but the Church’s condemnation of my favorite private
revelation is only a temporary error brought about by prejudice and liberalism.
Catholic women on the pill should be refused Communion, but it’s perfectly
legitimate to use natural family planning for the first five years of my
marriage in order to advance my career.

The result is a spirituality devoid
of content, a whitewashed sepulcher on whose marble surface is carved the image
of a saint, but whose interior contains nothing but bleached bones and
corruption.